2012 10Best: Winners and Losers

December 2011 By AARON ROBINSON Illustrations By ANDY POTTS

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LOSERS: From the Who the Hell Are You People? file: Ferrari introduced the FF, a $300,000 four-wheel-drive version of the Mercury Colony Park wagon; Maserati showed off a sport-utility based on the Jeep Grand Cherokee called the Kubang; Bentley said that it, too, will soon have a truck; and Ultimate (rear) Driving Machine maker BMW is developing a cheap, front-drive platform called the UKL for untere fahrzeug­klasse or “lower-class vehicle.”

WINNER: Two-time Daytona 500 champ Michael Waltrip brought a little deep-fried NASCAR pluck to the 24 Hours of Le Mans this year, joining the swarm of Ferrari 458s that caused so much heartache over at Team Audi. Waltrip, surely one of the older Le Mans rookies at 48, wasn’t in the Ferrari that punted leading Audi pilot Allan McNish into the rail in the first hour, nor in the car that jostled with Mike Rockenfeller’s zillion-dollar Audi R18 TDI in a horrific nighttime crash. That latter incident was with Waltrip’s co-driver and business partner, Rob Kauffman, a cashed-up London financier who may have been on the phone just then trying to buy Greece. Kauffman was booted out by officials, some say unfairly, but Waltrip and third man Rui Aguas drove the otherwise undamaged Ferrari until the 17th hour, when it belched its transmission.

LOSER: Buyers spanked Ford in this year’s J.D. Power and Associates U.S. Initial Quality Study, dropping the brand from 5th place in 2010 to 23rd. Besides clunky transmission tuning, people are mainly cheesed about the microscopic buttons and arcane submenus of Ford’s MyFord Touch onboard computer oracle, which makes Houston’s Mission Control seem like Romper Room. Ford’s response in a nutshell: The system is fine; you people are learning it wrong. Ford has beefed up the training of dealership sales-men with a three-week curriculum, and customer delivery of new vehicles has gone from being a quickie walkaround to a couple hours of hard-core instruction.

WINNER: One head at Ford that will probably never roll is Alan Mulally’s. The CEO who borrowed billions to save Ford from bankruptcy (and thus those evil executive salary caps that GM and Chrysler had to endure) headed into 2011 having received a nice attaboy in the form of a 524-percent raise in total compensation, mainly due to a healthier return on his stock options in 2010. Good CEOs are like diamonds: If you have to ask, you can’t afford it, but at $20.8 million, Mulally is once again the highest-priced automaker exec in the industry.

LOSER: Owners of vehicles used exclusively on farms can often get steep insurance discounts, including such notable sod turners as the Porsche 911 Carrera, Mercedes-Benz SL550, and BMW Z4. According to Quality Planning, a San Francisco company that verifies vehicle-ownership information for insurance companies, of 80,000 vehicles claiming farm-use discounts, eight percent, or 6382 vehicles, were located in ZIP codes where less than one percent of the population works in agriculture. Including Brooklyn, New York, where one “farmer” was saving $389 per year on insurance for his Audi A4.

WINNER: Three dozen Saudi Arabian women defied an Islamic ban on female ­drivers in June by taking to the wheel for a day of rolling protest. Maha Qahtani, 39, face hidden by a traditional black niqab, scooted around Riyadh in the family Hummer H3 until six police cars finally pulled her over. The cops let her off with a mild ticket for driving without a license, perhaps after reading her bumper sticker: “How’s my driving? Call 1-800-Then-You-Take-Mother-To-Her-Phlebotomy-Appointment.”

LOSER: With construction stalling for a few weeks in September on the partially government-funded Circuit of the Americas southeast of Austin, Texas, Formula 1 looked like it might not have a Yankee home next November, when F1 is scheduled to run its first U.S. round since 2007 at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway (or, if you will, the Circuit of the Middle Americas). However, F1 generalissimo Bernie Ecclestone has apparently also been chatting to officials across the Hudson from New York City about staging a race in Weehawken, New Jersey, no doubt at the Circuit of the Palookavilles. That event, targeted for June 2013, would be right after the Montreal round at the Circuit of the Way Way North Americas.

We were worried that Ecclestone and family wouldn’t have a crash pad on Ameri-can shores until his 22-year-old daughter Petra dropped $85 million on the 14-bedroom, 27-bathroom, 56,500-square-foot “Candyland” mansion built by Candy Spel-ling, widow of the late television mega-producer Aaron Spelling. Candy told the Los Angeles Times that if she had to do it over, she would have made the gift-wrapping room larger. Wouldn’t we all?

WINNER: Meanwhile, back here on planet Earth, one man’s incandescent life, captured by 5000 hours of footage and distilled down to 104 riveting minutes, etched an eloquent epitaph into our memory of the driver who was Ayrton Senna. Enough said.

LOSERS: From the Car and Driver in the Dock department: He married multiple women and was accused of assaulting a few who were underage and fathering a child with a 15-year-old, but convicted Texas polygamist cult leader Warren Jeffs, 55, got off clean on one heinous crime revealed in court testimony: To purge his Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints of anything resembling frivolous entertainment, said cult members, Jeffs raided the rooms of his boys and tossed out copies of Sports Illustrated and the esteemed publication you hold in your hands. Just threw them right out, the scumbag.

And in another courtroom near Charlotte, North Carolina, a lawyer for NASCAR rowdy boy Kyle Busch waved around a copy of Car and Driver’s exclusive test of the Lexus LFA in a transparent attempt to get his client off a one-year driver’s-license suspension for doing 128 mph in a 45-mph zone in a borrowed LFA. During his 30-minute impersonation of Clarence Darrow, the lawyer said Busch was seduced by what we called the LFA’s “seductive shape” and the way the cockpit “swallows you up like a hot dog in a leather and carbon-fiber bun.” Not bad, eh? Anyway, we’re not sure whether the judge bought that crap, or took into account Busch’s clean record or charitable work, or considered, as the lawyer said, that an LFA driven by Kyle Busch is like “a scalpel in a surgeon’s hands,” but she cut the suspension to 45 days, a $1000 fine, and 30 hours of community service. All of which proves that a simile in the hands of a lawyer is like a surgeon in the hands of a hot dog.